Is Your Country Doing Enough to Prevent Asteroid Attacks?

When it comes to asteroid attacks and your nation, principality, or sovereign city-state, a simple “who knows?” or “what can even be done to prevent asteroid attacks?” or “what the hell are you talking about?” isn’t going to cut it for much longer.

“The U.N. plans to set up an International Asteroid Warning Group for member nations to share information about potentially hazardous space rocks,” Scientific Americanreports. “If astronomers detect an asteroid that poses a threat to Earth, the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space will help coordinate a mission to launch a spacecraft to slam into the object and deflect it from its collision course.”

Scientific Asteroid, the meteor-community’s most popular astronomical journal, does not think slamming a space ship into “the object”—which has a name and a family and a rich interior life, by the way—should qualify as a “peaceful use of outer space” and fall under the jurisdiction of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The magazine’s scathing op-ed by prominent astroid/cultural critic David Rocks dares ask: “Is there a U.N. Committee for the Inconsiderate Uses of Outer Space that might be better equipped to ‘slam and deflect’?” You really have to read the whole thing. Very powerful.